SUCCESS/FAILURE OF DIETING

RESTRAINT THEORY
1. cause & consequences of cognitive restriction of food. attempting not to eat increases probability of overeating.
  1. supporting study assigned obese women to restrained eating, exercise or no treatment group. Food intake & appetite were assessed in 2 lab conditions, & for both, women in the restraint group ate more than women in the other groups.
    1. shows that overeating shown by many dieters is actually caused by their attempts to diet.
      1. does not explain how the minority do succeed at weight loss through restrained eating. anorexics also experience huge weight loss without recourse to overeating.
        individual differences contribute to success rates: low restrainers find dieting easy & high restrainers find it difficult as they may be hypersensitive to food cues & likely to abandon diets & one study found that they could not resist forbidden chocolate.
        challenging studies: pre-load/taste-test methodology used & found dieters do consume fewer calories after both low & high calorie pre-loads. tests like these are set in a lab and are highly unrealistic, lacking ecological validity as they cannot be generalised to real world settings. More naturalistic experiments used dietary self-monitoring forms & have also found dieters do eat less than non-restrained eaters & don't fall prey to overeating.
        the conflict between findings of different studies may be due to different measures to assess dietary restraint. it may be that some measures do not incorporate overeating to the same extent as the Restraint Scale & this would explain why some research has not found dieters overeat.
2. the boundary level states that dieters set themselves a diet boundary & try to eat within this self-imposed limit. but they sometimes break this boundary & binge until full because their satiety boundary overrides the self-imposed boundary, leading to overeating.
DENIAL
1. attempting to suppress/deny a thought makes it even more prominent. study asked participants not to think about a white bear & others to do it. Had to ring a bell. Those who were told not to think about it rang their bells far more often than the others. this illustrates how denial often backfires
  1. as denial of certain food is often central to most diets, according to the denial theory above, those who try to suppress thoughts of bad foods only increase the dieter's preoccupation with the very foods they are trying to deny themselves, inevitably denial creates more pressure to break a diet
    1. supporting study: restrained eaters divided into those who were high or low in disinhibition. Disinhibited group, i.e. those who tried to eat less but would often overeat, used more thought suppression than other group & showed rebound effect i.e. thought more about food afterwards. this shows that restrained eaters who tend to overeat try to suppress thoughts about food more often but they end up thinking about it more.
SUCCESS?
1. people like experiences less the more they repeat them. when dieting, this makes it harder to stick to a particular regime. to make it easier, dieters should focus on the details of the meal to get bored less easily & so stick to the diet.
  1. participants were given a jelly bean at a time & either shown general information or detailed info about the bean. those who only saw general info got bored of eating them faster & those who saw details enjoyed the task much more, giving support for the theory
IDA: research into dieting is gender biased as it focuses mainly on females so findings can't be generalised to males. some dieting can have negative consequences like development of anorexia & though it occurs mainly in females, it has 15% incidence of male sufferers so it is important to be able to understand male eating behaviour too.

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SUCCESS/FAILURE OF DIETING

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	Created by diana.m1629 almost 10 years ago